In late summer of 1974, I was reading "One Hundred of Years of Solitude" in an apartment that felt like solitude. I didn't have much in the way of furniture — bed, stove, noisy refrigerator. I would soon be off to graduate school, stripped of stuff I wouldn't need, off to an intellectual shore as foreign as Europe, namely classes in literary theory.

I read the novel in front of a frantically spinning fan in Fresno's intense summer heat. I was 21, slender but not starving, and so transfixed by the novel that I didn't fully grasp the grand experience or the remarkable nature of Gabriel García Márquez's descriptive energy and wildly inventive settings. Wasn't most literature like this? In graduate school I discovered the answer: No.

True, I had been an English major at Fresno State and had been pointed toward such writers. But I didn't realize at the time that García Márquez was like no other, that he would take his place among the greatest of all time. What would that realization have meant to me, anyway? I was just looking for a good book to read while the summer roasted us to the color of raisins.

I recall gazing up from the novel, sizing up the blank walls of my apartment, and then returning to the pages of "One Hundred Years of Solitude," with its floral landscapes, rivers with miraculous fish, and exotic birds like fruit in the trees. I read slowly, with quiet appreciation. I was swept away by the narrative but, as a non-traveler except to nearby lakes, how did I travel through my imagination to visit a place called Macondo, a place with a penchant for melancholia and nostalgia among its citizens?

While Fresno is definitely not Macondo, I went in search of my own territory that would offer the fabulous. I biked to south Fresno, where I grew up, and discovered the vacant lots where homes had been torn down in the name of urban renewal. Weeds grew in feisty bunches; feral cats peeked from behind these weeds, and dogs, thin as shadows, loped about. Abandoned cars rested with their rims and tires gone. I rolled my bike tire over a squad of chinaberries, and the scent of their broken skins evoked my childhood, my own sense of melancholia that had built up inside me like one large tear. And, hey, wasn't this the plum tree that I climbed when I was 6? And this stream of shattered glass looked familiar. I rolled down the alley, the broken glass like a trail that might lead me not to an actual stream where I could dip my hands for a drink, but to the 7UP Bottling Co. It was the place where I, a child as feral as a cat, had once stood at the mouth of the open building until a kind employee handed me a soda.

Some of this is fabricated, though the essence is true. It is the stuff of a young poet in search of a subject, a sense of place, his own Byronic posturing, his own Macondo, minus, of course, the lush jungles. Fresno is one hot, flat place, with a dry river choked with tumbleweeds and dumped tires. "One Hundred Years of Solitude" woke inside me a dedication to place. It evoked in me the value of the seemingly valueless. Under this pile of rotting boards could be a story of the longest rat with a long tail — no, let's make that the shortest rat with the longest tail. García Márquez did that to me, did that to all young poets. He allowed us to enhance the world as we saw fit.

Three years later, I would publish my first poetry collection, "The Elements of San Joaquin." I so much wanted to write in the vein of García Márquez, so why not a title that suggested his work? How young I was! My second book was titled "The Tale of Sunlight." More García Márquez in the shape of several poems, including one dedicated to the master and titled "How an Uncle Became Gray." It begins:

One day his room fluttered

Like a neon

With the butterflies

That followed him,

A herd of vague motion

He came to think

Was a cloud spread thin

And bearing

A blank message of rain.

If these initial lines, written when I was 22, do not suggest García Márquez, then I'm very clever at pulling the wool over the reader's eyes.

Little did I know then that a novel such as "One Hundred Years of Solitude" did not appear annually, or even once in a decade; nor did I understand that the genius that produced such a novel parallels the best of William Shakespeare — quote me on this, good people. First, there was García Márquez's haphazard childhood (he was raised by grandparents and fussy aunts), university life, journalism, starvation in the real sense, his boisterous friends that kept him from work, his apprenticeship as a serious writer through his first years of marriage, his own slow temperament, and then the lightning strike of imagination that became magical realism.

For García Márquez the lightning struck him in 1965 while driving from Mexico City (he and his family were off to a coastal vacation) when he heard within himself the phrase, "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad." The tone of the line struck him, tone being just about everything at the moment, tone being equivalent to an identifiable writing style. His literary duty forced him to turn the car around and head back to Mexico City and begin work. How his family must have groaned at their return without seeing the ocean.

García Márquez began with that first sentence and immediately faced difficulty akin to writers block. In an interview, he confessed that getting started was terrifying. He had the first line and the tone, but what should come next? This terror is not unusual among writers, or the poverty that creeps at its side. In the stress of writing his novel, his family became poor. The car, an Opel, was sold, and the items inside his apartment were pawned — goodbye television, radio, fridge and his wife's jewelry.

Did García Márquez really fear his first novel? I mean, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" — and others — were so prodigiously long that it would have his future readers believing that, for him, storytelling was second nature. Possibly he was embroidering a yarn about his writing habits and his creative fears. We know that he spent 18 months on the novel, which involved four generations and improbable moments, such as the grand appearance of most beautiful butterflies, the discovery of ice by the puzzled citizens of Maconda, and the wholesale memory loss that required the citizens to label the animals to remind them what they were called.

García Márquez learned from Cervantes and he learned from Faulkner. His tone was pitch perfect, and his characters imbued with comedy and deep sadness, the yin and yang of what makes complicated characters. His talent halted other writers in their tracks. Didn't one Japanese writer read García Márquez's great novel, put it down and stop writing for a decade? His feeling: I can't do better than this. Why even try?

We are better for his output. He created such novels, short story collections and nonfiction as "No One Writes to the Colonel," "Leaf Storm," "The Autumn of the Patriarch," "Chronicle of a Death Foretold," "Love in the Time of Cholera" and "The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor" — the titles themselves poetry! Few writers could induce the suspicion of the U.S. government, which for years denied him a visa because of his friendliness toward Fidel Castro. However, this changed when President Clinton pronounced "One Hundred Years of Solitude" his favorite novel. Good move, Mr. President.

García Márquez was a man of letters, humanitarian, righteous among all Colombians, leftist in world politics. He was husband and father. His nickname was Gabo. His territory was all of Latin America. He was the winner of prizes and a man who said of his beginnings, "I have never renounced the nostalgia of my hometown: Aracataca, to which I returned one day and discovered that between reality and nostalgia was the raw material for my work."

For me and other poets and writers of my generation, he stirred within us a desire to lift the ordinary into the fabulous, to decorate it boldly, to speak of its beauty — even if was just feral cats peeking from behind the weeds. Those feral cats, for me, were saying, "OK, young poet, paint us! Do what you will!" So I tried, and have been trying ever since.

García Márquez, we feel nostalgia for your departure — that a mighty cloud of butterflies led you to another place is certain. If I were a musical instrument, it could only be an accordion whose lungs breathe sighs of melancholia.

Gary Soto's most recent book is "What Poets Are Like." The Gary Soto Literary Museum is located at Fresno City College, where he got his start as a poet in spring 1973.

To read Elizabeth McCracken is to understand why the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Book Award and other prestigious institutions have awarded her their fellowships, accolades and grants. Each of McCracken's five books — two novels; one memoir; and now,...

It used to be if you wanted to hear someone talking to an author at length on the radio, you had to wait for Terry Gross and "Fresh Air" to invite someone on. I think Gross is a great interviewer, and sometimes her author chats are so good (particularly when it comes to nonfiction) that they substitute...